– Over to Japan already, as UWFI made one too many grandstand challenges and had it backfire on them this time. They had been challenging Rickson and Royce Gracie in the wake of UFC’s success, offering an open challenge to either one on their 11/30 show, looking for a match with Takada to determine the toughest in the world. This turned into Yoji Anjyo personally claiming that he could beat Rickson in under a minute at a press conference. This was seemingly the end of it, but then Anjyo flew himself to the US and showed up without warning at the Gracie academy in Santa Monica on 12/7, issuing yet another challenge in person this time. Anjyo was basically the guy behind the whole “shoot challenge” aspect of UWFI’s business model and was seemingly one of the toughest fighters in sparring contests behind the scenes. And he had taken down an uncooperative Iron Sheik during a worked match, and Sheik is also a tough guy. So…no problem, right?

– And then the payoff: Rickson decided to actually take him up on the challenge, and then immediately took Anjyo down into full mount and then pummeled him into hamburger with punches and then choked him out after five minutes of torture. People are speculating that this whole thing was an angle to set up Gracie v. Takada once and for all, but in fact it was just a grandstand challenge gone horribly wrong for the UWFI side. Luckily for them, it wasn’t Takada himself taking the beating. (Now, for those who don’t know the actual payoff for the story, three years later they finally did get Rickson to agree to that fight, and formed a new fighting organization to promote it. It was called the Pride Fighting Championship.)